


Call It Whatever You Want

by arcanemoody



Category: American (US) Actor RPF, Martin and Lewis RPF
Genre: (Is it still magical realism if they claimed it was real?), Aging, Angst with a Happy Ending, Child Loss, Confessions, Gaydar, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Injury Recovery, M/M, Magical Realism, Minor Character Death, Minor Original Character(s), Post-Break Up, Psychic Bond, References to Addiction, References to Drugs, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:53:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 7,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24290863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcanemoody/pseuds/arcanemoody
Summary: They don't have a word for it. At least, Dean doesn't.
Relationships: Jerry Lewis/Dean Martin
Comments: 38
Kudos: 39





	1. 1959

Pain in his chest -- that's how it starts. 

Dean's in Vegas. The green room. Checking the contents of the mini-fridge, staring at the half-empty bottle of Musselmann's behind Frank's vodka and two jars of green olives. He had marked the glass with a felt-tipped pen because that last glass he took on stage had not filled up and he suspected at least one of them had been “tippling” during his sets. Sure enough, the amber liquid that’s saved his bacon so many times is well below the line.

"All right. Who's been drinking my apple juice?" he barely gets the words out before he staggers back, falling half into a chair, half into Sammy. His eyes swim and, for half a second, it feels like he's really falling, shag carpeting breaking his fall instead of un-swept tile. 

“I’m sorry, man,” Sammy jokes, holding him steady and patting his shoulder. “I’ll send someone out to get me my own bottle.”

He laughs, gets it together just in time for his 9 o' clock cue, but he can't catch his breath and his chest feels tight for hours after the show.  
Jeanne hands him the paper the next morning -- already folded to the relevant page -- and he has his answer:

_'Jerry Lewis collapses on set, hospitalized at Mount Sinai.'_

His breathing evens out after two weeks. Around the same time, he learns much later, they pull his partner out of the oxygen tent. 


	2. Memories Are Made of This

Of course, that’s not the first time.

There was the time in Minneapolis when Jerry snapped the tendon in his back practicing a pratfall all on his own and knocked himself out. Dean had been in the dressing room, smoking a cigarette. He hadn’t even had time to put it out in the ashtray, he was already vaulting downstairs. 

Then there was the time his hernia acted up during a show and he’d looked up to see the kid in the doorway of the dressing room, phone receiver already in hand. 

“Where does it hurt, Paul? The lady from emergency services wants to know.”

It had been easy to chalk it up to proximity – they had lived together on the road for nearly ten years, taking periodic breaks for the birth of a child or a film shoot, where even the time apart then was spare. They were bound, Dean thought, to pick up on small signs of things that were out of the ordinary and react accordingly. Any shared symptoms could be chalked up to sympathy pains -- unusual maybe, but not unheard of. 

Except that there was also the time Jerry and Patti were three hundred miles away in Arizona and his own phone call accidentally intercepted Patti dialing 911 – because the kid had a fever that had spiked to 104 degrees and Dean had had a splitting headache all day that he couldn’t explain. There was the time Jerry had his third breakdown in eight years and was housebound per doctor’s orders. The note he left for Patti – “gone to see a sick friend” – might have been explainable… if Patti hadn’t disconnected their phone. Dean, cloistered in his den with a fatigue that had spread out to ever cell in his body, hadn’t needed to call. The kid had known he was in a bad way and come running. 

Not to mention he hasn’t seen his partner in the flesh for more than a year, hasn’t talked with him on the phone for months. He’s a voice swamped with static on TV, a face distorted by movie posters and the mocking impressions from fans and the occasional crewman backstage. 

So, this is a fluke. It has to be.


	3. 1960

He has a headache.

He's had a headache for two weeks straight and the aspirin has stopped working. The studio doctor is concerned enough that he makes an appointment to see a specialist. Dean leaves a gentle warning with the PAs about not telling Frank or Jeanne, and manages to keep it out of the papers for exactly one day. 

One. Day.

Until Jerry’s management reaches out to his and tears the roof off the whole thing.  
  
Dean really shouldn’t be angry at the kid. It’s not his fault that four years after their last hurrah, the press is still poised to pounce on the tiniest form of communication between them like the world’s most irritating hall monitor. He would love to bitch about the scandal sheets but _Confidential_ has been running scared from the studio lawyers for years and Parsons is on life support. This isn’t the gossip mill. It’s the Associated Press, Reuters, any schmo with a typewriter and an "in" with the phone company. He can’t help but feel exposed with that level of scrutiny and if his tone is a little raw when he calls Jerry after getting the all-clear from his doctor, well that’s just natural. That’s not really anger.  
  
He tells the concierge at the Fontainebleu he's Lou Costello. Her husky consonants aren't fooled but she connects the call anyway.  
  
“Hello?”  
  
“If you want to talk to me, kid, call me direct.”   
  
There’s silence on the other end of the line. And Dean might sound a little angry even with his stomach dropping through the floor. He goes with it. He might as well -- he’s on a roll, after all. His hands are shaking but his voice is dead still.  
  
“I mean I don’t mind if you’re more comfortable the other way, but it might be easier on the others if you just sucked it up and dialed the phone yourself.”  
  
“...are you all right?”

"What?"

"I’m asking if you’re all right, Paul. Because I’ve had a blinding headache for four days and, funny thing, my doctor can’t find a goddamned thing wrong with _me!_ ”  
  
There’s an edge of hysteria in his voice and he’s gone from silent to shouting in less than two seconds and that means trouble. The train is overheating on the platform; the missile is burning up on the launch pad. Their last year and a half together had been full of moments like this one and he’d run as fast as he could from them every time. Because it was easier and he could manage it from a distance.   
  
But, in this moment, he can’t bring himself to run.   
  
It hits him like a cold shower: Jerry hadn't heard rumors that he was sick. Jerry had _gotten_ sick. Because of him. Like everything else between them in the past four years, that’s his fault.   
  
“...all right. All right, calm down, pally,” he says, voice thick, tone soft like he’s soothing a startled horse. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Just tell me you’re all right!”

“I’m fine. I'm _fine_. Doc says I’m tip-top, just overworked. 'Sounds like you are, too."  
  
The switch in his brain has already flicked over. This is his job: grab the mic, take care of the kid. Four years since they worked together and he’s fallen right back into the role he gave up. To the manner born. God damn it.   
  
"Look, Germ. Take a few days off, okay? Paramount can do without their number one star for 48 hours. Shut the door and keep the lights off. You’re gonna be fine.”  
  
“It’s not fine! And I can’t take a day off! I have two more weeks of shoot time and I have to send the footage off for editing after that. It’s _not fucking fine, Paul_ …”

The last bit comes out in a defeated wail. Dean feels the chair slip out from beneath him.  
  
“It will be.”


	4. Which Way Did My Heart Go

He doesn’t tell anyone.

What is there to say? What words are there for this thing that won't get him locked up in the nearest psych ward or divorce court?

There are a few people who pick up on it anyway, particularly those who have gotten used to reading his meaning in as few words with as few syllables as possible.  


They’re on a film shoot at Warner's when Jerry cracks his head on Andy Williams’ show. Dean doesn't see it, but half the kids do and they all manage to ignore their mother's warning look at the dinner table twenty minutes later.

Sammy, fresh off the redeye from New York, hands him two aspirin and a glass of water before he even says anything.   
  
“I didn’t say I had a headache.” He also didn’t mention that said headache started at the base of his beck and flowered up and out to the top of his skull. Two aspirin probably weren’t going to do much, but he’ll take it.  
  
“You didn’t have to," he replies, voice grave.  
  
“Okay. How bad is this one gonna be?” he asks, already swallowing the tablets and chasing it with the water.  
  
“He got back up easily enough but he was hurting when I talked with him this morning," he says. "You know, a phone call wouldn’t go amiss.”  
  
Dean doesn’t look up.  
  
“Right,” Sam says, unimpressed. “Next time, you can ask him yourself.”

“So it really _is_ voodoo.” Frank says. Kind, almost intolerably kind as the light sensitivity hits and his ears start to ring.   
  
Frank, who still calls Ava every day, even with a messy divorce in a decade's worth of bitten dust behind them. He still loves her and he _still cares_ and he can’t -- or won’t -- make that break. He understands just a little better than Sam.   
  
“’Worth a phone call?” he asks.

“He took all my pictures down.”  
  
Or he says he did, along with half the newspapers in California. Dean could see it going either way -- taking all of the photos down in the Bel Air house, but keeping them up in his office. Not up in his office, but locked away in the kid's endless archive, next to his old headshots, his show schedule from the Hurricane Club and Sarah's jewelry. Beloved keepsakes, best to be kept in a locked drawer. Past, not future.

“All right then. Do you want _me_ to call him?”  
  
Dean wants to be left alone with the headache that just started in his neck and is working its way up to his brain. Frank obliges him a moment later and he finds himself staring out into the distance. Right before he chucks the aspirin bottle across the room.


	5. 1978

As ever, Dean could deal with the constant lows if there were a few highs in the mix to keep things interesting. 

This, oddly enough, has neither. Pain is its most consistent form -- or it may just be the thing he knows how to spot. Either way, it has a way of drowning out the memories of highs he doesn't quite trust now. It all peters out.  
  
Everything’s a bit hazy and stays a bit hazy for a decade. He can’t explain this either. Because he doesn’t drink nearly as heavily as he makes out that he does on stage and during the roasts, but, for the longest time, it’s like there’s always a fog between him and other people. Some days, it’s pleasantly drowsy. Others... it's not.   
  
At the start of this loose decade, he loses his footing during a shoot and nearly collapses into the steadying arms of the current Mrs. Sinatra and the future Mrs. Polanski. He plays it off as a gag, which makes the crew laugh; makes Sharon laugh; makes Mia stroke his arm in a way that's too much like both his mother and his daughters (not the biggest feat -- she _is_ Claudia's age, which makes the fact that Frank clearly told her even more off-putting).   
  
There are long moments where reality bleeds through and it’s like every inch of exposed skin is covered in cactus needles. He can’t fathom what exactly is going on, but he tamps it down.   
  
He gets by.  
  
\--  
  
Then one morning he wakes up and everything hurts. He can’t keep food down. His stomach feels like he's been back in the boxing ring, taking punches. He’s choking on air and the kids look as scared as he’s ever seen them – because a call from one of them (in this case, young Sasha) brings the rest of them running. He convinces Dino that he’s all right long enough to barricade himself in the den. He talks Deana into letting him dial the phone, telling her it’s the doctor he’s calling.   
  
It’s not.  
  
The youngest one, Joseph, picks up and stays on the line just long enough to give Dean a phone number in Houston, Texas, of all places. Patti answers when he dials it. The conversation is brief and she seems just shocked enough to answer honestly when he asks what's wrong.   
  
“Perforated ulcer,” she tells him. “He didn’t know. We were down here to get help for Jack’s migraines. Jerry started bleeding out in the waiting room.”  
  
“He didn’t notice anything was wrong?” A perforated ulcer the size of a lemon – Dean can’t wrap his brain around how even Jerry would fail to notice something like that.  
  
The rest of the story spills out like Patti's been holding it in depreciating escrow.

Percodan. Every day for thirteen years.   
  
His first thought, disturbingly, is just how perfect it is. Finding the right come-down for Dean had never been a problem – a beer, a cigarette, the new issue of _Batman_ , and a western on television. Failing one or all three of those things, a quiet room away from everyone else was enough to do the trick as well.   
  
For Jerry, the Pony Express orphan from the borscht circuit who made it to twenty years old drinking wine from a paper cup at Passover, things had been different. Hard liquor made him loopy. Reefer made him _chatty_ and loopy. He’d taken aspirin like candy after the fall in Minnesota and the knee injury after wiping out on the motorbike on the Paramount lot, getting short with people the second it started to wear off. His solution, inevitably, had been to take two or three more, for the sake of his pain and everyone else’s sanity. Opiates were a more effective -- and inevitable -- next step. And, with a surgery option off the table for the back pain, what doctor in California or Nevada was going to tell him no?

“How bad is it?” he asks.

“You tell me.”

He won’t. Patti’s been closer to him than Jerry ever was to Betty or Jeanne. The appearance of another Italian singer certainly clinched it for him that his younger friend had a type (and they had both been different enough from everyone else to confirm their uniqueness). But there are some things that he has never been willing to share with her.   
  
If he's honest with himself, he was never willing to share _any_ of it with her.   
  
Her sigh is enough to confirm she received his answer.  
  
“The surgery was yesterday. He’s going to have two days in recovery. After that, Michael says we’re looking at ten days of medically-assisted detox. Minimum.” She pauses, swallows thickly. “You... may want to clear your schedule.”  
  
Fortunately, he’s got nowhere to be.   
  
\--  
  
He calls afterward, when he can stand and little things like picking up the receiver doesn't feel like a Herculean effort.   
  
"...Selma?" 

The voice he hears on the other end of the line is both older and younger than any he’s ever heard. Dry and wounded, sore from the breathing tube the doctors removed days earlier, tired in spite of ten days of carefully monitored sleep.

He's held his young friend as he slept on overnight trains, saying nothing whenever Jerry scrambled into the lower bunk of a sleeper car and under his arm. If it meant Jerry turned his brain off long enough to get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, Dean was there. He could bear this load for him.

"Hey, Shirley," he smiles into the words, even as his heart tries to shred him from the inside. "I was worried you'd wake up and you wouldn't know my name."   
  
"Hard to forget."  
  
"Impossible. Right back atcha," he echoes. "Why didn't you tell me?"  
  
"I didn't _know_... goddamn it Paul, I'm a monster... It just hurt so much...”  
  
“What are you talking about? You’re not.” The meds Jer had been on had spared him pain, too, after all. If it made them both a bit sore when they were on the wane, it was a cycle that was easy to get trapped in.   
  
“All I've done for ten years is make people miserable...my brain's like swiss cheese, I don't even remember how it started... Oh god, Paul, I'm sorry."  
  
“What do you remember?”  
  
It's selfish of him, but his thoughts immediately go to Labor Day. That hug on stage eighteen months back, the swoon and relief he'd felt as Jer pocketed his notes and stepped into his arms easily. Frank had sprang it on him and Dean had been ready to run if it went bad. And it had only been good. As easy as it had ever been.   
  
If Jerry can't remember _that_...  
  
“Not much!”  
  
“Do you want me to fill in the gaps for you?”  
  
The weeping on the other end of the phone is all the answer he needs.


	6. Pennies From Heaven

Labor Day.

For something that comes once a year, it seems like both yesterday and a lifetime ago.

He kisses his two favorite people on national television, banters with Jerry for the audience (the butts in the seats and the millions watching from the comfort of their own homes), sing-a-little-dance-a-little...

He holds on to the warmth in his chest with both hands. The warmth of being seen — as Jer had always seen him — and not having the parts deemed “unsatisfactory” worked over with a scalpel. The kid he'd met in Times Square saw no unsatisfactory parts; was satisfied with _all_ of his parts. And having had that _one time_ in his life, he thinks, in that moment... he could go on. Having that once is enough to keep the lights on until the stars burn out.

When all of his parts stopped working, it would still be there.

Getting the words out has never worked for him (his English is poor, his Italian is worse, and the Yiddish of his partner's childhood is as remote as it's ever been). He settles for staying vertical even as he swoons in his partner's embrace, a fond gaze, a short wave off stage as he sings with Frank...  
  


_Trade them for a package of sunshine and flowers_

_If you want the things you love, you've got to have showers..._

_So, when you hear it thunder, don't run under a tree_   
_  
There'll be pennies from heaven..._

_...for you and me._

\--

Dean tells the story over and over until his words give way to song. Until the weeping on the other end of the phone gives way to the _susurrus_ of restful sleep and beeping machinery.

By the time they kids enter the den to check on him, he's two hours in to the best sleep he's hand in a decade, the phone receiver still in his hand.


	7. I Know I Can't Forget

The road only gets rockier as they each pass sixty. Jerry has a massive heart attack that results in a bypass. Joey Stabile is kind enough to dial the phone for him once Jerry is in recovery.

“You’ve got to cut this out, kid," Dean tells him, stretched out on the sofa in his den, cold pack on his sternum (he's taken to keeping those in his mini-fridge, away from the staff and the kids' prying eyes). 

“I’m sorry," he says, voice hoarse from the breathing tube. "I never learned how to stay down.”

“Don’t you dare. If you stay down, I might never get up."

"Don't _you_ dare."

\--

Dean has an emergency appendectomy and wakes up to flowers on the bedside table. No card, not from Frank or Sammy, not from any of the ex-wives or the kids. Process of elimination leads him to dial the phone.

"Did you forget how to write again, pally?"

"Did you forget _my name_ again?" he asks. "I wanted you to know I was thinking of you, but I didn't want to crowd you from a distance."

"No dice, Shirley," he says, decision made. "Make it up to me."

"What do you want?"

"Face-to-face. Come and see me."

For a second, he thinks the line has been disconnected -- the silence on the other end of the line is that deafening, broken by a thready intake of breath.

"I'm... I'm not ready for that."

"Why the hell not?"

"I could face a lot of things, when I was doped up, Paul. The second I was clean, it all fell apart."

This is nothing Dean doesn’t already know – from other people and from Jerry himself. Sobriety isn’t a magic wand -- surprise, surprise. He’d gotten clean and the marriage to Patti crumbled the second he was back at work, doing what he’d been doing every other day of their lives. Half of the kids weren't talking to him and the ones that were were guilting him left and right. For doing what he'd been born to do (and what they'd convinced themselves was part of an addiction).

"You think I'm going to fall apart on you?"

"I _know_ that I will on you."

It won't do any good to remind him that he's seen him face-to-face since being off the meds. Because those times, he had young Sam's presence and a captive audience of photographers and reporters to manage a performance for. The exhibitionist keeps him smiling when the little boy wants to run and hide. Dean wants Jerry and Jerry alone, distilled down to his most pure components.

And Jerry just told him he can't do it and stay vertical.

It hurts, even if it's not a surprise. A weight settles in his chest, heavy as ever even after thirty years. He'd pushed him. He knew that kid inside and out and he knew the sweet teenaged boy who'd tagged alongside him through Times Square would never be able to walk away. Home had left him, after all -- the rite of passage that was leaving your family to make your way in the world; that had never been his choice. So, Dean had pushed it, bent a situation that would force his partner to shoulder that burden, and he hadn't put it down since.

"All right. We'll table it for now," he says, finally. "But if we could talk sometime when one of us isn't horizontal, I'd appreciate it."

Jerry's laughter is loud and ragged.

"But Bubbe, you always liked me horizontal!"

"Only in person," he smiles, a twinge in his chest at a nickname he hasn't heard in so long. "You'd better get some rest before I start charging by the minute."

His laughter is even louder as Dean settles the receiver into its cradle. 


	8. 1987

Dino’s here.

He knows this has to be a dream because his son hasn’t lived at home since he was a teenager. He’s sitting on the sofa in the den, staring at his hands folded in his lap like when he was a kid and he’d had a bad day. Or his mama got annoyed a particularly high-spirited prank and expected Dean to ‘do something’ about it.

He doesn’t question it, just sidles past to switch on the TV. _Forty Guns_ is on. Good old Sam and Barbara Stanwyck. Gold times two. It’s going to be a good 3am.

“I messed up, Dad.”

More proof that this is a dream: they’ve never had this conversation. Not about how he pushed his beautiful, brilliant wife away; wounded pride turned to anguish when he finally pushed her too far. Second time lucky, but not lucky enough to keep it. Older and not as wise as he had tried to be.

“You did, kiddo,” he says, taking a long pull from his glass. He wishes the gin in his dreams tasted like the gin when he’s awake. “Do you want to learn from it?”

“I want to _not have done it in the first place_.”

“That ain’t one of the choices.” The horses are galloping on screen, taking after the cattle baroness in black. High-spirited woman with a whip. “Second chance?”

“That _was_ my second chance.”

“Okay.” He pauses. This next bit is going to hurt. “Clearly you didn’t want it enough.”

“Dad!”

“I know. Probably doesn’t sound helpful right now. But, you’ve gotta help yourself here. You know what you did.”  
  
“I didn’t the first time,” he sighs, defeated. “And I couldn’t help it the second time.”  
  
“I’m sure she knows — the girl’s no slouch. And she’s made her choice. You gotta make yours — you wanna do that again to someone else? Someone who won’t have the heart to walk away?”  
  
“No,” he says, voice low, eyes misty.  
  
“Good. It means my bad example didn’t go to waste.”

He laughs raggedly, reaching to steal a sip from his father's glass and Dean can only smile at the turnaround.  
  
The girls think he’s the “favorite.” Hooey. All of his kids are gold. He’d never been able to spank _any_ of them -- contrary to what their mothers always expected of him as 'man of the house.' He can only drink with Craig and cook with Gail; talk about acting with Claudia and watch westerns with Ricci and Gina. When Sasha is the one he chose à la carte and Deana is the tiniest, perkiest carbon copy he never expected. When he’s scared by how fast they all grew up and can’t bear to let _any_ of them down.  
  
He’s not even the only kid with his name. No, Dino is just the one who’s most like him. And he’s spent his whole life watching him a little more cautiously as a result, waiting for the inevitable heartbreak.  
  
“How do I keep from doing it again?”

“You learn to let go, then learn what’s worth holding on to.”

“Isn’t it already too late?”

“Why would it be?” he shrugs. “Love comes to you more than once. But you gotta work for it. If you love ‘em, they deserve that.”

“Thanks, Dad. I love you.” He smiles at him, eyes still murky and a melancholy that doesn’t belong there. He’s never seen his son melancholy, hasn’t seen him cry since he was sixteen and Billy and him had a fight to end all fights; swinging from grief to rage and back again in a way that was both familiar and not.

“I love you, too, kid.”

The ringing phone wakes him up.

\--

The US Air Force and the National Park Service, three days and a 12-man search party later.  
  
He never did like to fly (not like his boy who got his pilot’s license when most of his classmates were scrambling to be let behind the wheel of their dad’s station wagon).

Something about it made him feel as closed in as he ever felt trapped in a New York elevator. Still a coffin descending to hell, just with a longer drop. Even on the ground, the air corps’ restrictions on major cities like New York and Los Angeles during the war made it hard to catch his breath. Dim out conditions were bad. Blackout conditions were worse. Always being told it was “temporary.” Walk it off. Swallow your pride and your fear. ‘Do it for your country! It’s just temporary.’

Dean laughs. Because everything is temporary. His nose? Temporary. Second chances with three different wives (and one husband)? Temporary.

Dino’s plane being missing in the mountains of San Bernadino… temporary.

The blackout that comes after is looking pretty permanent.

\--

He lets Jeanne keep Dino’s medals, and the tri-folded American flag a corpsman in dress blues hands first to him, then Claudia when he can’t make his hands work.

The girls keep him upright through the funeral and the luncheon. He keeps the lights on for all of them, filling up the rooms of his house like barn swallows returned from far-flung locations until the first gust of winter (all but one).

A handful of the guys stick around, ties loosened, smoking on his porch. He’s grateful for the adult company, even if he doesn’t have much to add to the conversation. He only got his hands working an hour ago – to be able to hold a glass of gin and ice cubes. And his eyes seem to only want to stare out into the lights and haze of pollution hanging over Bel Air. Everyone’s words are a jumble, overlapping consonants and dry coughs.

_“It was nice of Jerry to come to the service...”_

Somewhere, another lightbulb switches on and the bones of his neck begin to work as he swivels his gaze to look at the others.

“He was there?”

A pall falls over the group, reducing their soundtrack to literal crickets, ringing out from the high grass at the edge of the crowded driveway.

"Jerry was there." Greg says, solemn as an epitaph stamped in granite. “He stood at the back of the church. Came and left in the side door, away from the reporters.”

Dean stares, head swimming. When he’s finally able to take a breath, his chest hurts.

"Can you get him on the phone for me?"

“You don’t know the number?”

“He always calls me from wherever he is.” A beat. “Sometimes I pick up.”

It’s nobody’s business after all. Least of all his business manager’s.

\--

Jerry is at Bally’s doing a show with Sammy. Greg manages to get the direct extension, after a brief big of tag team with Sam and Altovise. Dean waits until three o’clock in the morning, an hour after the last show will have ended, before he calls the dressing room.

"Can you feel this, too, pally?"

"I'm feeling a lot of stuff. Not all of this is you," his voice breaks.

It's a bit of an open secret – the staff thinks he doesn’t know about it; neither does Jeanne. Most of the kids have maintained some communication with Jerry off and on over the years, either through the older boys or Patti, who has a blanket policy on divorcing spouses (Dean included) but not children. Gail and Claudia both tend to call on the first Mrs. Lewis when things are rough. Sometimes Deana. Sometimes Dino (but not anymore).  
  
Face-to-face. They had been in the same room -- being in the same state would have been enough to rattle him. The _same room_... But there had been photographers and reporters and Jerry had ignored the courage of performance-mode to let Dean grieve in peace.  
  
He doesn't feel at peace now.  
  
"I need you." There’s nothing for it. There’s been nothing for it for more than forty years.

“I’m here.”  
  
“Jer, I can’t tell you.” There’s a weight and emptiness and he hasn’t felt solid ground underneath him in days, not since that first phone call when the plane went missing in the hills. Not since Dorothy broke down on him in the reception line at the church, tears staining his tie and jacket when he could barely cry himself.

He seems to be having no trouble with it now.  
  
"Paul, you have to find a way to go on. It’s what Dino would have wanted."

"Don't you understand?! I can’t lose anyone else.”

He says it before the words have even formed in his brain. The weight of it feels like his chest is caving in He lost his mother, father, and brother in less than a year. Two decades with all three of them gone had been tough. Nothing packs the punch of losing his son.

Only one other thing might.

“Please stay with me until I’m gone.”

The words aren’t right. They won’t come out right – it’s the same problem he’s had since he was five years old. Jerry seems to understand, anyway.

“Who says you get to be the one to go first?” he asks.

“I’m almost ten years older than you, Germ – be sensible. We both know that day is coming.”

“Why do _I_ got to be the one that’s sensible?!” he cries, decades falling from his voice. “I’m supposed to go first. We agreed.”

“When did we agree to that?”

“February, 1953.”

Dean cringes as he recognizes the month and year of his hernia surgery.

“The agreement doesn’t stick if I was asleep when you asked!”

“I spoke on your behalf. ‘Did a blood oath and everything.”

“You said I pulled my IV line.”

“I said ‘your IV line got pulled.’ I never said _you_ were the one that did it.”

Being joined at the hip, he has laughed until he cried many times over the years in Jerry’s company. Sitting on the floor of the den, late into the night, with his children and grandchildren asleep on the floors above him, he feels the cycle start and restart, turn inside out.

“…From the time I laid eyes on him.” His voice is rough as he pushes the words through. “He never stopped moving, from the second he was on this earth. ‘Couldn’t stop, always moving, always making noise… The kid had a banshee scream, like he knew he’d have to be heard above three older sisters.”

Jerry’s own laugh is damp and ragged, making him spill the rest of it out like a dam bursting.

“He was going to make the world know he was there. From the day he was born. I loved him so much from the second I saw him. I’ve only had that twice in my life – when I met my son and when I met you… This has been too hard, Jer. Don’t make me do this again.”

His partner’s not laughing now – the twinge in his chest and the sound of wet sniffling in his ear tells him as much.

“I’ve… never had what I felt when I met you,” he finally says, deadly serious. “I don’t know what it’ll do to me if you go first.”

Dean can’t tell if this is a refusal, a confession, something in between. His partner’s heart on his sleeve as always, making him want to reach through the phone lines to tuck him under his arm and never let him go. It hurts. It’s the only thing that _doesn’t_ hurt.  
  
“I think they call this an ‘impasse.’”

“We’re too old for a pass, pal. I want a ring.”

“I already got you a watch, Shirley!” he laughs. “Come see me in person next time, face to face, and we’ll negotiate.”

\--

He later wonders how long he lays there, phone in hand with silence on the other end, but neither one of them hangs up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "Dorothy" Dean refers to being at the funeral is Dorothy Hamill, Dean Paul Martin's second wife -- the break-up of which is referenced in the dream.
> 
>  _Forty Guns_ was directed by Sam Fuller, who, between film projects, worked as a crew member on _The Colgate Comedy Hour_. Martin and Lewis were among the attendees photographed at the premiere for his 1954 film, _Hell and High Water_.


	9. 1989

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean turns 72. He gets exactly what he wanted.

Touring ain't what it used to be, whatever Frank might think. He's biased, of course. So is Sam. After their early heartbreaks (and middle heartbreaks) the stage is maybe the one thing in life that never let either of them down. It's no wonder neither one of them wants to leave it. Dean has the same history of heartbreaks -- he does not have the same feeling about performing that they do. It's not the home it used to be. Neither is playing to a room full of people who have either had a few bottles or are adjacent to someone who has. But maybe he can make it through a few nights in a casino the way he couldn't make it through a tour of ampitheaters.

It might seem silly for a man around the bend of 70, but Dean misses the speak-easy days of his youth; the backroom gambling den days. When being a croupier was a secret art and being drunk had an illicit thrill. In the basement or backroom of a gun shop or tannery that had to be empty by 7am so it could be open to serve the good people of Ohio at eight. The massive amusement parks that populate the Vegas strip now are a pale shadow not only of Bugsy's playground but America's secret and sacred past-times, a bloated curiosity for the raincoat crowd. And they're the places that draw the biggest crowds and have the most perks (for the headliners, the musicians are another story). So he commits to do some shows the week of his birthday. Signs his name to one last contract one last time, a lawyer and an agent at each elbow.  
  
Getting legal always makes things worse. Saying it out loud makes Deanna laugh, makes Ricci laugh, makes Ella, the make-up girl laugh.   
  
"I don't know about that one," El says, dabbing some powder on his forehead. "But, then again, I've been illegal my whole life."

She has tattooed fingers: a Greek lambda on her ring finger and a triangle on her middle finger. Dean hasn't seen women with tattoos since Coney Island in the late '40s. El's from Queens and she laughs her head off when he tells her that at the start of the week.  
  
"And you're great, kid," he replies, looking her right in the eye. "Just as you are. How's going straight going to improve on that?"  
  
"Well... fair enough."  
  
The kids don't think he pays attention. But Dean sees things that they miss completely.   
  
"Hey," he smiles. "Ask me what my first number's going to be tonight."  
  
"What's your first number going to be, Mr. Martin?"  
  
" _Rainbows are Back in Style_."  
  
It's _Everybody Loves Somebody_. Deanna and Ricci think he's joshing with El the same way he joshes with his grandkids; wind 'em up and watch them go off at the punch line. The stage manager, looming in the doorway, probably thinks he's senile. But the smile Ella gives him lights up the room -- eyes tearing over, the soul changing moment of being seen. He's glad he could give that priceless gift to someone this week.  
  
_Now_ , he can make it through the show. 

  
\--

"Excuse me? Do you know how long I've been waiting back here?"

The familiar voice from the shadows brings on a wave of nostalgia (and something deeper). Dean's eyes dart to the wings, He can feel his chest cracking open as a tall figure emerges, abruptly drowned out by the pandemonium that fills the audience. Dark and deep-voiced; the deep voice he's gotten used to hearing on the phone three times a week for the past two years...

Wearing a matching tux. 

Thirteen years later, thirty years... he can't do the math in his head because Jerry is here, and Jerry reaches for him and he _goes_. Into his arms, knees locked to avoid slipping to the floor. 

They've never been able to read each other's thoughts, but he can feel his partner's every breath and heart beat (tied as it is to his own heart and his own inability to breath); dizzy, giddy as that beautiful, golden moment drags out. As _Dean_ drags it out. 

"I gotta kiss you on the lips."

He literally has to. It's a need, not a want (like his boy's life and health). And it hits Jer's reset button like he hasn't seen work in years. (Good to know he hasn't lost his touch...)

The words aren't there for what he feels. Never have been. Not in English, not Abruzzi, not the old country slang he picked up from his father or the new slang that permeates the conversations with his younger daughters. Dean gropes for the best ones he can manage, listening to himself speak as if from a distance of a hundred miles...

_"...you surprised me."_

_"I love you."_

_"I mean it."_

Jerry sees him. He knows. And Dean's own heart skips a beat as he replies.

_"I love you, Dean."_


	10. Auld Lang Syne

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing left unsaid. If they're going to do it this way, he may as well commit.

Death has always been the great fear. Dean thinks about it a lot as he settles into his self-imposed "retirement." Four walls, closing in all the time. Not just elevators and airplanes now -- the back of a taxi or a chauffeur-driven car keeps getting smaller (COPD means he occasionally gets to share the bench seat with an oxygen tank).

He’s not afraid of it anymore – which is ironic; the one time in his life he’s not living in a place with an elevator and the closest he gets to flying is a brisk walk upstairs. The next time there’s a pain in his chest, or a dizzy spell that makes him grab for the granite counter like it’s the elixir of life… it’s never _his_ life (or death) he’s thinking about.

Then he has to dial the phone. His phone, Ricci’s, Claudia’s, Sasha’s. Doesn’t matter. He grabs it and excuses himself to the nearest dark room.

_“What’d you do now, Jer? We talked about this.”_

It’s diabetes. “Take your insulin.” The president of France stuck him with the sharp end when he put a medal on him. “Tell him to get you a boy with steadier hands.”

They do okay.

When he wakes up short of breath, a weight in his head that feels like death but isn’t, tears already running down his face. He grabs the cordless phone off the table, crossing his fingers that the battery holds out. Sam gives him the number and Altovise is kind enough to pass the receiver when he asks.

“I can’t, Paul…”

Sammy’s last kiss, his last _breath_.

He’s honestly amazed Jerry got even those three words out.

“Shhhh, you talk too much, kid.” Dean can always manage a few words if he can sing them. And so he does: _Pennies from Heaven_. _Melancholy Baby_. _Just in Time_. Over and over until he can feel the ache in his head clear. He sings him out the door, when he’s finally forced to hand the phone over to Sammy’s wife, now widow.

“Say goodnight, Paul.”

“Goodnight, Paul,” he smiles, hearing Altovise’s own anguished laughter on the line.

They do okay. 

\--

This retirement… has a limited timeline. And if Jerry manages not to trip over his (newest) youngest child on the way to his next interview or Legionnaire’s award, it looks like this is an argument he’s finally going to win.

It does not feel like winning when he has to face the kids or Jeanne. Jeanne is still beautiful, funny and carefree now that the kids are grown and the daily stress of keeping tabs on them all is off her plate. He tries to be a better friend than he was a husband. When she smiles at him like Judy on a bar stool in Vegas or Frank in the back of a shared limo, he feels like he’s almost succeeded. Maybe it’s what he deserves after making all those jokes about women’s lib; three wives and five daughters later.

“What have I always told you, Paul? Women are people.”

“Yeah, you remember that when the little one is old enough to tell you ‘no,’ Germ.”

\--

Their last fight ever might be the stupidest one they’ve ever had. And it cuts off abruptly when Dean has a coughing fit.

It’s about the little one. Danielle Sarah. Dani. He’s relieved that Jerry finally learned not to name children after living relatives. He does not suggest that if they had found a surrogate a year or two later, they could have named her “Pauline.” Dean never met Jerry’s grandmother. He saw entirely too much of his no-good father and so he always calls the little sprog by her middle name.

Of course, Jerry can’t let that stand. When has ever been able to let _anything_ stand?

"What'd 'you want, Jer? You want me to say Danny was... what? A misunderstood genius? Jolson's heir apparent? He was a hack. He was a working hack that couldn't quite work enough to keep two bits in his pocket, same as half the guys we knew. I could forgive it but he was also a miserable son of a bitch who never looked after you like you deserved and made a goddamned mockery of everything you got and were able to hang on to later. I almost went to his funeral just to kick the casket."  
  
There's an argument coming, a rebuttal, colored with rage and hysteria. He doesn't pause long enough to give it room. He's on a roll after all.  
  
"No! Shut up, you’re going to listen to me for once! He didn't take care of you. Sarah did that. And after she was gone, Irving did that. Then me, then Patti, sometimes on alternating shifts because God knows we all needed it. Every time we thought the glass was full, the glass got bigger—”

He coughs. So hard and for so long he’s worried Jerry hung up.

He should have known better.

“…you okay?”

“I’m good,” he says, clearing his throat. “Oxygen tank’s right here.”

“Don’t let the kids smoke over it,” he sighs, voice quiet.

“My kids don’t smoke.”

“Lucky you, four of mine do. I think. You talk about the glass getting bigger. I never knew where yours even was. I pulled my hair out trying to think of what I could do for you that would fill up all the spaces you wouldn't even say were empty. I loved you so much and you made me feel like just another piece of bad news you had to stall long enough to run from.”

Nothing left unsaid. Spit the poison out, wrap the wound.

Well, if they’re going to do it this way, he might as well commit.

“Of course I did, pally. How else were you going to walk away?”

This part he doesn’t have to explain at least – it always had to be Jerry. Dean couldn’t have gotten a foot out the door if he tried. A lifetime of quietly backing out of the room from his parents, from girls, from his kids… but not his partner.

The laughter he hears on the other end of the line is manic, turning damp quickly and Dean swipes at his own eyes in solidarity. Then he takes a hit of oxygen that tastes like he sat too close to the television.

Shirley’s on the TV tonight instead of the usual western and he lets himself get lost in the scene for a moment _. “When you love a married man, you shouldn’t wear mascara.”_ She’d had better luck with Billy Wilder than he had. And Jerry, for that matter. She fills the silence better than they did anyway.

“Did you want me to leave?”

“Hell no,” he says, relieved when he gets another laugh, dryer this time. “But you needed to. At least you had Patti to talk to about it – who did I have? All my eggs were in your basket.”

“You’ve still got me," Jerry replies, committed. Completely. "You have me whenever you want.”

He nearly takes another hit of oxygen, leans in to the phone instead, the illusion of privacy complete.

“Be careful how you throw around those ‘whenevers,’ we ain’t got many to spare between us.”

“I already told you – I’m dying first. And if I go out big enough, I’m taking you with me!”

The familiar laughter down the line and in the room makes him smile, 

“You promise?” A beat. "You'd better." 

Dean has a feeling -- whatever's waiting, whoever's waiting -- they won't let him in without him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The movie Dean's watching during the phone call is _The Apartment_ , starring Shirley MacLaine and directed by Billy Wilder (Dean's director on _Kiss Me, Stupid_ and almost Jerry's director on _Some Like it Hot_ ). 
> 
> The song title has two meanings: _Auld Lang Syne_ is sung at the end of the film (and Dean died on Christmas Day).


End file.
